This chapter traces how Frances Hodgson Burnett and J. M. Barrie both participated in and resisted the creation of the emerging subgenre of children’s theatre. On the one hand, Little Lord Fauntleroy ...
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This chapter traces how Frances Hodgson Burnett and J. M. Barrie both participated in and resisted the creation of the emerging subgenre of children’s theatre. On the one hand, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Peter Pan drew large numbers of children into the playhouse, and turn-of-the-century commentators credited them with helping to establish the category of “children’s play” as a distinct dramatic genre. On the other hand, when we compare these two dramas to other productions which aimed to attract child playgoers during this time, it becomes evident that Burnett and Barrie were resisting the increasing pressure to cater shows specifically and exclusively to the young. Even as more and more critics began to insist that children needed their own specially simplified and sanitized shows, these playwrights stubbornly continued to include “adult” content in their dramas, clinging to the old pantomime tradition of trying to attract a mixed audience and resisting the idea that children needed to be shielded from such matters and addressed in very different terms from adults. Their plays thus provide a final piece of support for Gubar’s argument that Golden Age authors often resisted the growing pressure to conceive of the young as a race apart.Less

Burnett, Barrie, and the Emergence of Children’s Theatre

Marah Gubar

Published in print: 2009-06-01

This chapter traces how Frances Hodgson Burnett and J. M. Barrie both participated in and resisted the creation of the emerging subgenre of children’s theatre. On the one hand, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Peter Pan drew large numbers of children into the playhouse, and turn-of-the-century commentators credited them with helping to establish the category of “children’s play” as a distinct dramatic genre. On the other hand, when we compare these two dramas to other productions which aimed to attract child playgoers during this time, it becomes evident that Burnett and Barrie were resisting the increasing pressure to cater shows specifically and exclusively to the young. Even as more and more critics began to insist that children needed their own specially simplified and sanitized shows, these playwrights stubbornly continued to include “adult” content in their dramas, clinging to the old pantomime tradition of trying to attract a mixed audience and resisting the idea that children needed to be shielded from such matters and addressed in very different terms from adults. Their plays thus provide a final piece of support for Gubar’s argument that Golden Age authors often resisted the growing pressure to conceive of the young as a race apart.

This chapter focuses on J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. It credits Barrie with discovering the third reason why it is necessary to weigh an infant as soon as possible, aside from weight providing medical ...
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This chapter focuses on J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. It credits Barrie with discovering the third reason why it is necessary to weigh an infant as soon as possible, aside from weight providing medical information and giving parents the answer to the question often asked by friends and family about the newborn. The third reason why babies are weighed at birth is because they have ability to fly until they have been weighed. The law of gravity does not kick in until the moment that it is physically demonstrated that the dial on a weighing instrument moves when the infant is placed on it.Less

Poor Peter

Daniel M. Ogilvie

Published in print: 2004-01-15

This chapter focuses on J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. It credits Barrie with discovering the third reason why it is necessary to weigh an infant as soon as possible, aside from weight providing medical information and giving parents the answer to the question often asked by friends and family about the newborn. The third reason why babies are weighed at birth is because they have ability to fly until they have been weighed. The law of gravity does not kick in until the moment that it is physically demonstrated that the dial on a weighing instrument moves when the infant is placed on it.

This chapter discusses J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). The literary and biographical origin of Peter Pan is Barrie's memoir of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), where he narrates his mother's ...
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This chapter discusses J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). The literary and biographical origin of Peter Pan is Barrie's memoir of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), where he narrates his mother's inability to recover from his brother's death—her favorite son. For midcentury critic Peter Coveney, Peter Pan represents the late-nineteenth-century “cult of the child,” which “serves not to integrate childhood and adult experience, but to create a barrier of nostalgia and regret between childhood and the potential responses of adult life. The childhood indeed becomes a means of escape from the pressures of adult adjustment, a means of regression toward the irresponsibility of youth, childhood, infancy.” The play thus exhibits ambiguities, encompassing oppositions between life and death, past and eternal present, and time lost and time recovered.Less

J. M. Barrie’s Eternal Narcissist : Peter Pan

Richard Locke

Published in print: 2013-07-16

This chapter discusses J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904). The literary and biographical origin of Peter Pan is Barrie's memoir of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy (1896), where he narrates his mother's inability to recover from his brother's death—her favorite son. For midcentury critic Peter Coveney, Peter Pan represents the late-nineteenth-century “cult of the child,” which “serves not to integrate childhood and adult experience, but to create a barrier of nostalgia and regret between childhood and the potential responses of adult life. The childhood indeed becomes a means of escape from the pressures of adult adjustment, a means of regression toward the irresponsibility of youth, childhood, infancy.” The play thus exhibits ambiguities, encompassing oppositions between life and death, past and eternal present, and time lost and time recovered.

This introduction proposes that Golden Age children’s authors and members of the cult of the child were at best ambivalent and often hostile to the growing cultural pressure to conceive of children ...
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This introduction proposes that Golden Age children’s authors and members of the cult of the child were at best ambivalent and often hostile to the growing cultural pressure to conceive of children as a separate species from adults. Rather than wholeheartedly embracing the “Child of Nature” paradigm, figures such as Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame conceived of children as socially saturated, highly acculturated beings—and, unlike Dickens and other chroniclers of childhood writing primarily for adults, these and other children’s authors refused to assume that precocious exposure to the civilized world would doom the child to a depressing fate. Contemporary reviews of Golden Age children’s classics and 19th-century discourse about the cult of the child reveal that Golden Age commentators recognized this: ironically, the two groups most strongly faulted by recent critics for portraying childhood as a static, remote, and idealized state—children’s authors and members of the cult—were censured in their own time for failing to promote a Romantic ideal of primitive simplicity.Less

Introduction : “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast”

Marah Gubar

Published in print: 2009-06-01

This introduction proposes that Golden Age children’s authors and members of the cult of the child were at best ambivalent and often hostile to the growing cultural pressure to conceive of children as a separate species from adults. Rather than wholeheartedly embracing the “Child of Nature” paradigm, figures such as Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame conceived of children as socially saturated, highly acculturated beings—and, unlike Dickens and other chroniclers of childhood writing primarily for adults, these and other children’s authors refused to assume that precocious exposure to the civilized world would doom the child to a depressing fate. Contemporary reviews of Golden Age children’s classics and 19th-century discourse about the cult of the child reveal that Golden Age commentators recognized this: ironically, the two groups most strongly faulted by recent critics for portraying childhood as a static, remote, and idealized state—children’s authors and members of the cult—were censured in their own time for failing to promote a Romantic ideal of primitive simplicity.

This chapter focuses on the psychoanalytic interpretation of and popular case writing around the Golden Age classics Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Case writing on children’s ...
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This chapter focuses on the psychoanalytic interpretation of and popular case writing around the Golden Age classics Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Case writing on children’s literature undertakes not only the education of the reader but also a broader critique of innocence, ignorance, or immaturity. With both Alice and Peter Pan, critical case writing takes a cue from psychoanalytic case writing and from broader anxiety about man-child sexuality, discernible in popular retellings and adaptations. The Wizard of Oz has also been assumed as having a repressed adult history. These and other Golden Age texts are addressed to adult as well as child subjects.Less

Three Case Histories : Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz

Kenneth B. Kidd

Published in print: 2011-11-23

This chapter focuses on the psychoanalytic interpretation of and popular case writing around the Golden Age classics Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Case writing on children’s literature undertakes not only the education of the reader but also a broader critique of innocence, ignorance, or immaturity. With both Alice and Peter Pan, critical case writing takes a cue from psychoanalytic case writing and from broader anxiety about man-child sexuality, discernible in popular retellings and adaptations. The Wizard of Oz has also been assumed as having a repressed adult history. These and other Golden Age texts are addressed to adult as well as child subjects.

This chapter examines how the Peter Pan brand of peanut butter lost its market dominance. Through the years, Peter Pan has generally recieved favorable reviews from consumer publications such as ...
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This chapter examines how the Peter Pan brand of peanut butter lost its market dominance. Through the years, Peter Pan has generally recieved favorable reviews from consumer publications such as Consumer Reports; it has been lauded variously for its spreadability, sweetness, and having a lot of peanut chunks in its crunchy variety. In 1972, however, two samples of Peter Pan crunchy tested by Consumer Reports contained insect fragments and rodent hairs. Even more objectionable was the first Salmonella outbreak in peanut butter in U.S. history, which happened to Peter Pan in 1971/1972. In 2006/2007, Peter Pan suffered its second Salmonella outbreak at the Sylvester, Georgia plant. In the end, ConAgra Foods, owner of the Sylvester plant, was found responsible for 714 reported cases of Salmonella poisoning in forty-seven states. Peter Pan has since fallen to a distant third behind Jif and Skippy in the race for peanut butter market leadership in the United States.Less

How Peter Pan Lost Its Groove

Jon Krampner

Published in print: 2014-06-24

This chapter examines how the Peter Pan brand of peanut butter lost its market dominance. Through the years, Peter Pan has generally recieved favorable reviews from consumer publications such as Consumer Reports; it has been lauded variously for its spreadability, sweetness, and having a lot of peanut chunks in its crunchy variety. In 1972, however, two samples of Peter Pan crunchy tested by Consumer Reports contained insect fragments and rodent hairs. Even more objectionable was the first Salmonella outbreak in peanut butter in U.S. history, which happened to Peter Pan in 1971/1972. In 2006/2007, Peter Pan suffered its second Salmonella outbreak at the Sylvester, Georgia plant. In the end, ConAgra Foods, owner of the Sylvester plant, was found responsible for 714 reported cases of Salmonella poisoning in forty-seven states. Peter Pan has since fallen to a distant third behind Jif and Skippy in the race for peanut butter market leadership in the United States.

Between January 1961 and October 1962, over 14,000 Cuban children under the age of 16, unaccompanied by their parents, departed Cuba for Miami. “Operation Peter Pan” was a clandestine scheme ...
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Between January 1961 and October 1962, over 14,000 Cuban children under the age of 16, unaccompanied by their parents, departed Cuba for Miami. “Operation Peter Pan” was a clandestine scheme organized by the Catholic Church in Miami and Havana, working with the CIA and anti-Castro forces in Cuba. Parents sent their children out of Cuba for several reasons. As U.S.-Cuba relations deteriorated, and parents could not rejoin their children, many youngsters—about 7,000—found their way into long-term foster care or orphanages throughout the United States. This chapter agrees that the “emotional economy” of parenting, domestic arrangements, and sexuality helps maintain political and economic authority the world over. Fifty years of child migration conflicts have, like missile crises, bombings, and assassination plots, nurtured profound animosities between Cuba and the United States.Less

Cuba’s Monumental Children : Operation Peter Pan and the Intimacies of Foreign Policy

Karen Dubinsky

Published in print: 2014-01-21

Between January 1961 and October 1962, over 14,000 Cuban children under the age of 16, unaccompanied by their parents, departed Cuba for Miami. “Operation Peter Pan” was a clandestine scheme organized by the Catholic Church in Miami and Havana, working with the CIA and anti-Castro forces in Cuba. Parents sent their children out of Cuba for several reasons. As U.S.-Cuba relations deteriorated, and parents could not rejoin their children, many youngsters—about 7,000—found their way into long-term foster care or orphanages throughout the United States. This chapter agrees that the “emotional economy” of parenting, domestic arrangements, and sexuality helps maintain political and economic authority the world over. Fifty years of child migration conflicts have, like missile crises, bombings, and assassination plots, nurtured profound animosities between Cuba and the United States.

Fantasies of Flight invigorates the field of personality psychology by challenging the contemporary academic view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. The book ...
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Fantasies of Flight invigorates the field of personality psychology by challenging the contemporary academic view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. The book exchanges a heart-to-heart, case study approach to understanding human behavior for the current strategies of categorizing and comparing individuals according to their manifest traits. Its author asks and endeavors to answer questions like “What were the psychological conditions that led Sir James Barrie to create a character named Peter Pan?” and “What were the dynamics behind the Marshall Herff Applewhite's conviction that a space ship, hiding behind the Hale–Bopp comet, would rescue him and his Heaven's Gate followers after they enacted a mass suicide pact in 1997?” Answering these questions requires the author to resurrect “old” ways of thinking about personality and “old” strategies for studying individuals one by one. Early in the book, the author reviews the history of why intensive case studies were discredited in psychology and describes how Sigmund Freud's psychobiographical account of Leonardo da Vinci's fascination with flight inadvertently abetted critics of psychoanalytic psychology. He then performs a partial psychobiography of James Barrie and the origins of Peter Pan, followed by an investigation of Carl Jung, who fashioned the collective unconscious to serve as humankind's link with eternity. Arguing that personality psychology needs to become less insular, the author integrates information from the disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience into a theory regarding the latent needs that both Barrie and Jung sought to satisfy. The theory, including its emphasis on the onset of self and consciousness, is then applied to an array of well-known and obscure individuals with ascensionistic inclinations.Less

Fantasies of Flight

Daniel M. Ogilvie

Published in print: 2004-01-15

Fantasies of Flight invigorates the field of personality psychology by challenging the contemporary academic view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. The book exchanges a heart-to-heart, case study approach to understanding human behavior for the current strategies of categorizing and comparing individuals according to their manifest traits. Its author asks and endeavors to answer questions like “What were the psychological conditions that led Sir James Barrie to create a character named Peter Pan?” and “What were the dynamics behind the Marshall Herff Applewhite's conviction that a space ship, hiding behind the Hale–Bopp comet, would rescue him and his Heaven's Gate followers after they enacted a mass suicide pact in 1997?” Answering these questions requires the author to resurrect “old” ways of thinking about personality and “old” strategies for studying individuals one by one. Early in the book, the author reviews the history of why intensive case studies were discredited in psychology and describes how Sigmund Freud's psychobiographical account of Leonardo da Vinci's fascination with flight inadvertently abetted critics of psychoanalytic psychology. He then performs a partial psychobiography of James Barrie and the origins of Peter Pan, followed by an investigation of Carl Jung, who fashioned the collective unconscious to serve as humankind's link with eternity. Arguing that personality psychology needs to become less insular, the author integrates information from the disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience into a theory regarding the latent needs that both Barrie and Jung sought to satisfy. The theory, including its emphasis on the onset of self and consciousness, is then applied to an array of well-known and obscure individuals with ascensionistic inclinations.

The death of a brother or sister affects the survivors throughout life. Psychoanalysts have focused on ‘the replacement child’ born after the death of a sibling. Parents become overly protective or ...
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The death of a brother or sister affects the survivors throughout life. Psychoanalysts have focused on ‘the replacement child’ born after the death of a sibling. Parents become overly protective or frozen in grief, unable to respond to the living child. The lost sibling becomes a saintly figure impossible to compete with or live up to. In a period of high mortality and large families, the death of a sibling meant rearranging accustomed patterns of seniority and responsibility. Religious belief, mourning rituals, and sharing grief with extended kin helped contain bereavement, but death of siblings in old age wiped out shared memories. James Barrie had lost his brother in boyhood. The ongoing popularity of his hero Peter Pan, the boy like his brother who never grew up, reflects the generations who reduced the numbers of children they bore and then lost so many to the devastation of the Great War.Less

Sibling Loss

Leonore Davidoff

Published in print: 2011-11-24

The death of a brother or sister affects the survivors throughout life. Psychoanalysts have focused on ‘the replacement child’ born after the death of a sibling. Parents become overly protective or frozen in grief, unable to respond to the living child. The lost sibling becomes a saintly figure impossible to compete with or live up to. In a period of high mortality and large families, the death of a sibling meant rearranging accustomed patterns of seniority and responsibility. Religious belief, mourning rituals, and sharing grief with extended kin helped contain bereavement, but death of siblings in old age wiped out shared memories. James Barrie had lost his brother in boyhood. The ongoing popularity of his hero Peter Pan, the boy like his brother who never grew up, reflects the generations who reduced the numbers of children they bore and then lost so many to the devastation of the Great War.

The image of Peter Pan pounding on the window trying to get his mother's attention as her arms are wrapped around another child and Barrie's account of his childhood project of begging Margaret to ...
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The image of Peter Pan pounding on the window trying to get his mother's attention as her arms are wrapped around another child and Barrie's account of his childhood project of begging Margaret to answer the question “What about me?” are so clearly alternative versions of the same story that they require little comment. At this juncture, however, objections can be raised about having located and latched onto a childhood memory that happens to coincide with a plot in a story and exaggerating it far beyond its true importance. This chapter discusses the convening of a diagnostic council, described in Chapter 5, whose members were charged with the task of studying case materials and arriving at a consensus regarding critical components of a person's life.Less

Outside Opinions

Daniel M. Ogilvie

Published in print: 2004-01-15

The image of Peter Pan pounding on the window trying to get his mother's attention as her arms are wrapped around another child and Barrie's account of his childhood project of begging Margaret to answer the question “What about me?” are so clearly alternative versions of the same story that they require little comment. At this juncture, however, objections can be raised about having located and latched onto a childhood memory that happens to coincide with a plot in a story and exaggerating it far beyond its true importance. This chapter discusses the convening of a diagnostic council, described in Chapter 5, whose members were charged with the task of studying case materials and arriving at a consensus regarding critical components of a person's life.